MLA 2015

Lyric Writing in a Byronic Perspective

Jerome McGann

Romantic studies since 1960 have made great recoveries, as we all know, not the

least having been the recovery of Byron’s work. But such recoveries also always involve

certain corresponding losses. “Blindness and Insight” has aesthetic and historical, as

well as hermeneutic, applications.

I mention that famous scholarly rubric to recall another book in which De Man

figured prominently. Romanticism and Consciousness, published in 1970, was perhaps

the single most influential volume in Romantic Studies of the past 50 years. It achieved

its eminence for two reasons. First, the book’s editor, Harold Bloom, grouped his own

and other advanced critical work, including De Man’s, in an eclectic anthology with

essays by important academic precursors of the previous generation. Second, it

organized the collection so that the new work established the intellectual context for the

earlier work. In this instance the child was very much father of the man.

Let us remember, however, that this book by no means set the course for the

succeeding 25 years of Romantic Studies. The book was majestically silent about women

writers and feminist theory, it had little sense that an historical perspective would soon

become imperative, and it was clueless about how important Byron and Byron studies

were soon to be. But its conceptual and philosophical approach – “Romanticism and

Consciousness” – would inflect much of the most important work that was coming.

Today I have time to look at only one major consequence of that book’s approach.

And of course I have to be brief, if not grotesquely elliptical. An influential essay in

Bloom’s anthology will hold my particular attention because it clarifies so much of what

we came to know and came to forget about Romantic poetry. This is Abrams’ celebrated

“Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric”, first published in 1965, but

reprinted in Bloom’s anthology.i

It is a beautifully constructed essay – no small reason for its influence. But it says

things that, in certain cases, aren’t in fact true, and in other, more important respects, are

so misleading that they obscure what Abrams calls his principal subject: “the manner of

proceeding in Romantic poetry” (203). One of its key ideas, for instance, is seriously

debatable: that Abrams’ Greater Romantic Lyric was “the earliest Romantic formal

invention”. Various poems in Burns’s Kilmarnock volume might claim priority here, as

might Sir William Jones’s Hindi transliterations, or – even more clearly, perhaps – the

sophisticated literary ballads that began to proliferate in the 1790s.

As to matters of fact, consider the last sentence of Abrams’ first paragraph:

“Only Byron, among the major Romantics, did not write in this mode at all” (201). In

fact, the one canonical Romantic poet who did not write in this mode at all was William

Blake, not Lord Byron, and Blake’s highly innovative lyric writing figures not at all in

Abrams’ essay. His absence is completely understandable, however, since he regarded

Nature as the whore of Babylon and a “delusion of the perishing vegetable Memory”.ii

But for Abrams’ “Greater Romantic Lyric”, Nature is an essential productive element.

As to Byron, even if we take Abrams’ specialized formal view of a “Greater

Romantic lyric”, he produced notable examples. “To the Po” undertook the form

seriously, “Churchill’s Grave”, parodically. Abrams perhaps overlooked the latter

because – like the closely related Manfred -- it satirized the form of Greater Romantic

lyricism. As for “To the Po”, it perhaps slipped Abrams’s attention because it is less

“extended” than the poems he thought of as “Greater”, like ”Tintern Abbey” and “This

Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”.

Besides, if we want to investigate the most distinctive forms of Romantic poetry,

including the period’s most important formal innovations, our focus ought to be on ballad

poetry and Romantic tale-telling, both narrative and dramatic. Not without reason has

Lyrical Ballads been seen as a pivotal book. “Michael”, “The Idiot Boy”, and “We Are

Seven” are epochal works of Romantic consciousness and meditative reflection. But then

at least as innovative in this respect are Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, The Giaour, and

Manfred – three works whose historical influence on the subsequent course of Romantic

and Post-Romantic poetry and culture at large would be far more consequential than

Wordsworth’s great book.

But the differential represented by Blake and Byron exposes a much more serious

faultline in Abrams’s argument about the distinctive “manner of proceeding” in Romantic

poetry, including Romantic lyric poetry. The poems that illustrate Abrams’ “Greater

Romantic Lyric” are indeed period-original, and he tracks their formal precursors with

great skill, though applying the term “Greater” is mostly a rhetorical move. Whether

they exhibit a “New lyric form” (203) is arguable. That they represent “the manner of

proceeding in Romantic poetry” (203) is plainly wrong, though it is certainly a manner of

proceeding.

Moreover, it is manifestly not the most prevalent manner of proceeding, nor the

one that had the greatest impact on subsequent practice. That distinction falls to the

wildly proliferating variations on ballad and narrative that the Romantics invented.

Wordsworth’s “Lyrical Ballads” would later emerge as the normative instance of such

forms. But that emergence had a paradoxical result in the academic reception of

Romanticism. The period’s clear obsession with the poetic opportunities offered by

ballad and narrative slipped from attention, as did the influential aftermath of those

obsessions and achievements.

Abrams’ Greater Romantic Lyric is not the feeding source for the most important

work of Tennyson, the Brownings, the Rossettis, or Swinburne, nor for the innovative

work in 19th century European poetry from Pushkin and Heine to Mallarmé, and least of

all for 20th century poetic practices. Indeed, if one were to hazard a single notable

precursor for that eclectic narrative masterpiece The Waste Land – surely the

paradigmatic work of the last century -- it would be The Giaour.

Some years ago I tried to open this general subject of Romantic poetry with an

essay on “Byron and the Anonymous Lyric”. The essay took as its point of departure the

arresting view of “lyric” writing that Baudelaire constructed out of his reading of Pindar,

Byron, and Tennyson.iii Reviewing a scholarly work on Pindar, Baudelaire proposed that

these poets found ways of translating intense personal experiences into non-subjective

and impersonal registers. A poetry of masks and theatricalities, these lyrical forms

perfected themselves when the form of expression as such displaced the authorial source

as the center of attention. Writing this way Rimbaud would later declare: “Je suis un

autre”. In that non-subjective but decidedly personal poem, “Thalassius”, Swinburne

wrote even more to the point of becoming “now no more a singer, but a song”. All of

Blake’s poetry has a similar structure and style, and it is historically pertinent to

remember that his work only became culturally accessible when it was mediated by the

Pre-Raphaelites and their (Symbolist) Circles.

We also want to remember that Abrams’ essay is explicitly a reprise on Louis

Martz’s celebrated 1954 study of the seventeenth-century Poetry of Meditation. Abrams’

description of his Romantic lyrics mirrors Martz’s description of certain seventeenth-

century poems that shaped themselves to the structure of formal religious exercises,

especially the exercises of St. Ignatius. But Abrams rightly points out a “conspicuous

and significant difference” (228) between Martz’s seventeenth-century poems and his

Romantic poems. Though “composition of place” is in each case essential, the Romantic

“landscape” of meditation is “present, particular, and always precisely located” (228),

whereas the other was “not a specific locality. . .but . . .a typical scene or . . .allegorical

landscape” (228). Not until he published Natural Supernaturalism did Abrams explain

the significance of that difference, which involved what he called “a sustained dialogue

between mind and landscape” (2 ). A famous passage from Wordsworth’s Recluse

project describes that reciprocity.

How exquisitely the individual Mind

(And the progressive powers perhaps no less

Of the whole species) to the external World

Is fitted:--and how exquisitely, too--

Theme this but little heard of among men--

The external World is fitted to the Mind;

And the creation (by no lower name

Can it be called) which they with blended might

Accomplish:--this is our high argument.

(The Recluse Part I. Home at Grasmere, 816-824)iv

I note in passing that when Blake read those lines he annotated them severely: “You shall

not bring me down to believe such fitting & fitted I know better & Please your

Lordship”. The structure and style of Blake’s poetry, even his short lyric poetry, is a

highly critical revelation of human illusions about “the external World”, both natural

and artfully manufactured. For Blake, that reciprocity was not benevolent, it was

demonic. He called the reciprocity an action of “dark Satanic mills”. In his matured

theoretical ([reversed wheels etc].

Blake’s “manner of proceeding” with Romantic narrative would eventually

become important – indeed, at least as important as the special form of lyric that

interested Abrams, and arguably far more important. Blake’s remarkable “Auguries

of Innocence” looks like nothing so much as a forecast of Wallace Stevens or Hart

Crane or William Carlos Williams.

But I must set that interesting subject aside and focus on something I think

will better clarify the subject of Romantic and post-Romantic lyric form.

When Abrams remarked that Byron alone of the Romantics didn’t cultivate the

“Greater Romantic Lyric”, he neglected to consider a work that was staring him in

the face -- Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.v The neglect is important because it obscures

a different and, historically speaking, an even more consequential approach to

Romantic expression.

Abrams summarizes the “structure and style” of his “new form” in this way:

Wordsworth’s Prelude can be viewed as an epic expansion of the mode of

“Tintern Abbey”, both in overall design and local tactics. It begins with the

description of a landscape visited in maturity, evokes the entire life of the poet as

a protracted meditation on things past, and presents the growth of the poet’s mind

as an interaction with the natural milieu by which it is fostered, from which it is

tragically alienated, and to which in the resolution it is restored. (203)vi

Crucial to this poetic model is the “resolution” it drives toward. Childe Harold is

different, and its four cantos are exemplary for the structure and style of Byron’s lyrical

work in general. Childe Harold’s extended meditations on “the external World” move

seriatim, being marked affectively by eruptive moments of fury, satisfaction, boredom,

insight, despair, disgust, and even a kind of ecstatic self-annihilation. The list of feelings,

like the experiences they reflect, could be indefinitely extended because they do not yield

to philosophic or theological resolution. To “ponder boldly” (Childe Harold IV. 1135) is

Byron’s interminable determination.

Romantic scholars understand all of that. What we haven’t studied with sufficient

care is the special kind of structure and style, Romantic as well as post-Romantic, that

emerges from this “manner of proceeding”. It isn’t often enough observed that, with

some notable exceptions, Byron’s greatness as a lyric poet is incompletely realized in

contained set piece poems, whether they might be poems in his own style, in Blake’s

style, or in the style explicated by Abrams. Like Don Juan, Childe Harold is a glorious

anthology of lyric writing, with a host of discrete passages that rise out of the loose

narrative, run for some uncertain time, and then cease, sometimes gradually, sometimes

abruptly. But the same is true for all the long works, including the plays but most of all

the tales. “The Incantation” in Manfred is one of the period’s (and one of Byron’s)

greatest and most complex lyric works. Lucifer’s arresting reflections on intellectual

freedom at the end of Act II scene 2 of Cain in another, and so is dreadful curse that Eve

hurls at her surviving son at the end of the play. The scorpion passage is only perhaps

the most famous of the many lyrical effusions in The Giaour, and the other tales generate

similar examples.vii

A distinctive feature of these lyrical passages is their relation to the immediate

literary context, typically a narrative context, that generates them. But a dramatic

context, as in Manfred, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, or Beddoes’ Death’s Jest Book,

will do as well. The key thing is that the context be highly dynamic. In these conditions,

running narrative or plunging dramatic action function much like what Abrams calls,

after Martz, the “composition of place”. But in this kind of lyrical environment --

Byron’s work in particular -- the poetic place is not only highly volatile and

morphogenetic, it is primarily historical and trans-historical rather than natural or

transcendental.

Abrams rightly speaks of his Wordsworthian lyrical mode as a “dialogue of

the mind and landscape”. Out of such dialogues comes an experience of what

Wordsworth called a “central peace subsisting at the heart/ Of endless agitation”

(The Excursion Book IV. 1146-47). Thinking of Canto III of Childe Harold, Abrams

briefly remarks that “Even Byron” wrote of having an experience “as if the

surrounding universe were absorbed into [his] being” (224). But “central peace”

does not characterize the Byronic geosphere, which is always uncertain and brinked

to sudden change. That is the Nature into which Byron is occasionally “absorb’d”

(Childe Harold IV. 689). The experience makes him what he calls “A sharer in [the]

fierce and far delight” (Childe Harold IV. 871) of an endless agitation subsisting at

the heart of the volatile natural order.

Even when Byron’s verse assumes a naturalist setting – by no means his most

characteristic move – the result is a structure and style of unsettled recurrent experiences.

Thoughts on Nature come intermittently to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and they settle

nothing. Indeed, they keep throwing into relief the historical crises, past and present, that

are Byron’s tormenting preoccupation. So the restless narrative keeps moving until it

finally comes to a halt in that stoical vision of endless mortal passage, the “Address to

Ocean” (Childe Harold IV. stanzas 179-184).viii

Childe Harold’s lyricism is built from this structure of resolute irresolutions. The

narrative propagates a set of discrete and recurring expressive units, each of which

emerges from what has been previously lifted to instability, each of which then drives on

to a succession of ensuing unsuccesses. Once initiated, the narrative augments itself

through such an intense lyrical dilation that the narrative line gets engulfed in a process

Byron describes as

The unreached paradise of our despair,

Which o’er-informs the pencil and the pen,

And overpowers the page where it would bloom again.

(Childe Harold IV stanza 122)

The style is also well illustrated in Byron’s greatest and most modern lyrical

ballad, that “snake of a poem”, The Giaour, which grew, literally piecemeal, from 344

lines in the first fair copy MS to 1334 in the seventh edition. One might say, correctly,

that these extensions augment the reflective depth of the poetry. But significantly, the

extensions do not turn the action toward closure and resolution. In this respect we can

see why lines 68-102, The Giaour’s famous meditation on the fatal gift of beauty (“He

who hath bent him o’er the dead”, etc.), fairly define the poem’s lyrical style. The

passage is a sentence fragment of thirty-four lines cast in an impersonal third-person

syntax (Baudelaire’s “lyrique anonyme”). Trailing out a never-to-be-completed lament

for all never-to-be-mitigated experiences of loss, the lines forecast the tale’s series of set-

piece lyrical effusions on what Byron called “defeated care” (“Lines Written Beneath a

Picture”). The long late additions that comprise the Giaour’s tortured memories – the

poem’s structural climax -- speak for themselves, as does the narrator’s enigmatic final

reflection on Leila, Hassan, and the Giaour: “This broken tale was all we knew/ Of her

he loved, or him he slew.” So while The Giaour is well characterized, like

Wordsworth’s “Michael”, as a lyrical ballad, its structure is entirely different from

Wordsworth’s poem – as different as the structure of Childe Harold is from The Prelude,

that epic version of the Greater Romantic Lyric.ix

These distinctively Byronic verse procedures help to illuminate the character of

Byron’s short, set-piece lyrics. Compare, for example, the structure and style of his

“Prometheus” lyric with Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper”. Both open with an

arresting expressive immediacy, but Wordsworth uses the occasion to extrude from it a

tense internal colloquy. When the last stanza shifts to the past tense, we recognize the

structure and style of Wordsworthian lyrical ballad: having begun in a gesture of

spontaneous overflow, the poem resolves to a final state of tranquil recollection: “The

music in my heart I bore/ Long after it was heard no more”.

“Prometheus”, however, never leaves its tense present tense and imperative mood.

Furthermore, because the first two stanzas read like an Aeschylean Chorus, they

implicitly summon a context of portentous cultural and literary reference. Those stanzas

could be a speech lifted from Aeschylus’s lost Prometheus Unbound. Exactly because

we are expected to know they’re not, we are arrested by what we know they are, by the

scale of their visionary pretense. The exposure of the poetic illusion raised in the first

two stanzas arrives with the equally theatrical third stanza, where the poem’s impersonal

choral voice turns from the ancient Titan to address the reader. The poetic daring of the

first two stanzas has licensed the “impenetrable spirit” that fills the last, where

Prometheus gains his long-delayed cosmic triumph through an act of modern poetry that

Edward Bostetter long ago called “poetic ventriloquism”.x

“Prometheus” illustrates in brief lyric form what Baudelaire had in mind when he

discussed Byron’s “anonymous lyric” style. Byron’s first person singular address is

constantly slipping into the second or third person or aspiring to the rhetoric of a first

person plural. Because the first person singular never appears in “Prometheus”, the poem

does not have to undergo the transformation to first person plural that occurs so often in

Byron’s work. His regular moves to narrative and dramatic forms signal this “way of

proceeding” in his work, and it can be tracked as well in certain key short lyrics like

“Prometheus”. Begun anonymously, as an imitation choral fragment from ancient Greek

drama, the poem creates another impersonal voice able to speak at large “To Mortals of

their fate and force”.

“Messalonghi, 22 January 1824. On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth

Year”, one of Byron’s signature lyrics, pivots at line 22 on just such a first person

transformation. The first person singular organizes the address of the poem’s first five

stanzas. But in stanza six the poem turns.

  The Sword, the Banner, and the Field,

       Glory and Greece around us see!

The Spartan borne upon his shield

                      Was not more free.

For over 150 years that passage was printed “Glory and Greece around me see”. But that

first person “me” is a mistaken transcription of Byron’s MS.xi The shift to the first person

plural signals the dramatic change that overtakes the five concluding stanzas, where the

poem moves to claim allegiance with certain imposing Western cultural authorities.

The first of these is Sappho. Byron initially appears to identify with the love-

possessed poet through her legendary home, Lesbos, an extinct “volcanic isle”. But this

psychic identification turns out far less consequential than the verse form that calls it to

our attention. Byron’s poem is an anglicized recovery of Sappho’s signature prosodic

form. Sappho’s suicidal “fire” points Byron and his poem toward a very different history

– a tradition of martial self-extinction – that descends to Byron primarily from Homer.

The third stanza of his poem is meant to recall the ancient Greek method of

communicating by signal fires, a practice Homer alludes to in The Iliad (Book 18).

Homer constructs a simile to describe the glory of Achilles in war. He imagines men

fighting to save their city from an enemy, and

at the going down of the sun the line of beacon-fires

blazes forth, flaring high for those that dwell near them to behold,

if so be that they may come with their ships and succour them –

even so did the light flare from the head of Achilles. (Iliad 18. 210-14)

Like “Prometheus”, the literary background of this poem is the mythic history of Greece,

with which Byron so persistently identified. Here the identification climaxes with the

reference to “the Spartan, borne upon his shield”. Byron locates himself among the

legendary 300 taking up their suicidal mission at Thermopylae. He has come to this poem

to “give/ Away thy breath”.

That second person – ambiguously singular or plural – is fulfilling the rhetorical

shift that began in line 22. Sappho and Homer are moving Byron to summon

an absent presence, his impersonal self -- “Awake, my spirit” -- for “us”. Keying off a

play on words (“borne”), the four final stanzas veer sharply into their second person

rhetoric (“thee. . .thy. . .thy. . .thee. . .thy. . .thy”). The stanzas come as if both Byron and

his readers were being addressed by the poem, or perhaps as if that summoned “spirit”

now had license to speak on its own, without Byron’s mediation.

These kinds of moves toward lyric anonymity reflect Byron’s lifelong

preoccupation with what he perceived as the “malady” of “egoism”.xii The attitude

shapes juvenilia like “Lochin Y. Gair” and “A Fragment” (“When to their airy hall”) and

is explicit in poems like “The Isles of Greece”, a splendid example of Byron’s

polyphonic lyric. Because the ballad is simultaneously “spoken” by three very different

voices -- Lambro’s camp poet, Robert Southey, and Byron – it shifts into a different

register: anonymous, linguistically absolute. A supreme example of this way of poetic

proceeding comes at the end of Act I of Manfred when “A voice” speaks an “Incantation”

over the prostrate body of Manfred. This new, impersonal voice is the formal cognate of

the “spirit” wakened in Byron’s thirty-sixth year poem. The Incantation declares that “a

magic voice and verse” haunts the action of Manfred, a fatality we glimpse in the poem’s

uncanny textual moments: the moment when we discover that the “one word, for mercy”

is the word “Manfred”; the moment when prosody conjoins the words desert and desert;

most dramatically, the moment when the final word of the Incantation has its concealed

import exposed in the final line of the poem. ‘A magic voice and verse ‘finally invests an

otherwise simple wordplay, “Wither” and “whither”, with Nietzschean significance.

All these poems show why Byronic lyric style is, paradoxically, so impersonal,

why Baudelaire called it an “anonymous” style, and – most important of all -- why it

requires the continuities of narrative and dramatic action to discover its full potential.

The composition of place in “Prometheus” and “On This Day” is not a natural locus

amoenus (as in Wordsworth) or an allegorical design (as in Donne), it is the inheritance

of the historical and legendary narratives of Greek antiquity. Not without reason was

Byron, far more than the other English Romantics, so committed to translation and

transliteration. The “Tambourgi” ballad in Canto II of Childe Harold, like “The Isles of

Greece” in Don Juan (III. 698-784), are complex acts of lyric ventriloquism – lyrical

ballads in a Byronic mode. They emerge through a process that Keats called “negative

capability” and that Byron called “mobility”. Byron finds his own voice by channeling

voices that call out to him from his poetic inheritance.

Byron’s “anonymous” style works to depersonalize those voices because he is

interested in recovering not literary precursors but literary forms, as his imitations and

translations from Ariosto, Tasso, Dante, Berni, Martial, Horace, Sappho, and Aeschylus

show. A medieval Spanish ballad will draw his attention as quickly as Martial’s

epigrams or a vulgar Italian street song. That the forms can be modern as well as ancient

is clear from cases like the Suliote song “Tambourgi”, the Wordsworthian “Churchill’s

Grave”, or the homage to Pope in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Or consider The

Siege of Corinth where we watch Byron trying to mimic the prosodic innovation that

Coleridge introduced with his experimental masterpiece Christabel.

But The Giaour is perhaps the most brilliant and complete example. Like

Wordsworth’s “Michael”, The Giaour is a lyrical ballad. Unlike “Michael”, however,

Byron is not trying to show with his poem “that there neither is, nor can be, any essential

difference between the language of prose and metrical composition” (“Preface” to Lyrical

Ballads). Wordsworth’s quarrel with “poetic diction” drove his revolutionary prosodic

experiments to establish “a plainer and more emphatic language” for poetry. This move

is without question a signature innovation of Romantic verse practice – a move that

Byron would himself make when he unrolled the colloquial manner of Don Juan. For its

part, The Giaour is Byron’s attempt to mimic the epic mode, that massive act of redacting

an archive of ballad verse. Crucially, Byron does not take Homer as his model. He turns

instead to the latter day inheritors of oral epic whom he heard at first hand reciting their

verses in Levantine coffee houses in 1809-1810. What fascinates Byron is that this

ancient verse tradition of oral verse is still being practiced in post-Enlightenment Europe.

And yet, as he reflects in his lyrical preludium to The Giaour: “’Tis Greece, but living

Greece no more”. The Giaour is Byron’s attempt to revive the dead by saving certain of

their cultural appearances in transliterated English forms.

As an amateur classicist, Byron recognizes that the contemporary Levantine

coffee house performers are perpetuating an oral practice dating back to the “Singers of

Tales” of ancient Greece. The Giaour therefore involves a thankless and even a ludicrous

pretension, a fact amply demonstrated through the poem’s inimitable prose notes. As his

alter-ego, the ballad singer on Haidee’s island, laments: “And must thy lyre, so long

divine,/ Degenerate into hands like mine”? Yet if Byron mocks his own poetic effort, as

he often does, The Giaour undertakes the effort still, and the poem has some of his finest

lyric poetry, not least in its three great epic similes: the butterfly passage, the scorpion

passage, and the breathtaking description of the mortal combat between Hassan and the

Giaour. Each is a set-piece lyric addressing three of Byron’s central preoccupations: love

as an unreachable paradise, guilt as a self-crucifixion, and Romantic will as a struggle to

the death. While the figural terms in each case are drawn from the natural world, the

composition of place is not Nature. It is rather anti-nature, it is art, it is finally what a

poetic “mind can make when nature’s self would fail” (Childe Harold IV. 439). Here,

strictly: what Byron’s mind makes from its reciprocal exchange with both Nature and his

poetic inheritance.

What distinguishes Abrams’ greater Romantic lyric and Byron’s anonymous lyric

gets sharply exposed when we realize that, in Byron’s view, “nature’s self” can fail – that

is to say, can fail the best aspirations of human beings. Nature neither betrays nor keeps

faith with human minds and hearts. More than that, for Byron the human “mind can

make” forms that throw Nature’s into eclipse. He cites the Venus de Medici as one such

form, and he spends the fourth canto of Childe Harold citing many others. But the canto

is itself a performative demonstration of the difference, and the indifference, between

Nature and what Hannah Arendt called “Mind” or the “vita activa”. So far as Nature is

concerned, Krakatoa (or Chernobyl) simply represents morphogenetic change. But so far

as Byron is concerned – the “Stanzas to Ocean” are his climactic argument – those

ceaseless processes of change can be enlisted to build, unbuild, or rebuild worlds. In

each case, Byron’s Nature could, as it were, care less. That is why Nature can be

important for Byron. Nature’s power over and indifference to human endeavor turns the

screw on Byron’s desperate humanism and his commitment to his defeated care for all

that human beings love and lose. In Byron, Nature has no interest in or capacity for

human endeavor. It is Byron who watches over the rise and fall of “Assyria, Greece,

Rome, Carthage”. Indeed, in Byron’s view of the reciprocity between Man and Nature,

the obligation of care is all on the human side, for it is Man who, “enamour’d of distress/

Would mar it into wilderness” (The Giaour 50-51).

Being clear about Byron’s work is not the main reason I’ve brought forward this

subject of his Romantic “manner of proceeding”. My chief interest is in using Byron to

help us gain greater clarity about styles of poetic address developed between Cowper,

Burns, and Wordsworth at one end, and (say) Merrill, Howe, and Prynne at the other.

Different figures at our immediate terminus ad quem could be easily named, just as

others – George Crabbe comes immediately to mind – would also serve for a terminus a

quo. The point is that all the territory comprised by and between 1780 and the present is

dominated by balladic and, even more, by narrative procedures, whether linear or

nonlinear, narrative or non-narrative, paratactic or syncretic. While significant short-

form lyrical writing appears throughout Romantic and Post-Romantic writing, “story”

and what Laura Riding Jackson called The Telling -- however truncated, elliptical, or

dramatically rendered -- continues to dominate poetic aspiration to the present day.xiii

i “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric”, in Romanticism and Consciousness. Essays in

Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (W. W. Norton: New York, 1970): 201-229.

ii Blake: “Nature has no outline: / but Imagination has, Nature has no tune, but Imagination has! /

Nature has no Supernatural & dissolves. Imagination is Eternity” The Ghost of Abel plate 1.

iii “Byron and the Anonymous Lyric”, The Byron Journal (1992), 27- 45

iv Blake’s Annotation to this passage in Wordsworth is famous: “You shall not bring me down to

believe such fitting & fitted I know better & Please your Lordship” (Blake’s Annotations to

Wordsworth’s Prewface to The Excursion, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed.

David V. Erdman, commentary by Harold Bloom. Newly Revised Edition (Doubleday: New York,

1988): 667.

v Thinking of Canto III of Childe Harold, Abrams briefly mentions (224) that “Even Byron wrote of

having an experience “as if the surrounding universe were absorbed into [his] being”. But

Abrams does not press an investigation of this matter. I suspect he could see how alien a Natural

Supernaturalism was to Byron’s argument in Canto III. Instead of representing a “central peace

subsisting at the heart/ Of endless agitation” (The Excursion Book IV. 1146-47), Childe Harold

Canto III tells a very different story. Byron is “absorb’d” (689) in be Blake: coming “A sharer in

[the] fierce and far delight” (871) of the endless agitation subsisting at the heart of the natural

order.

vi See as well this account from later in the essay: “the poet’s mind, momentarily revitalized by a

correspondent Inner breeze, moves from torpor to violence to calm [in an] evolving meditation

on the relation of mind to nature [that culminate[s] in the figure of the one life as an eddy

between antitheses” (223). The result is a dynamic resolution that Abrams calls, recollecting

Coleridge, the “Coalescence of Subject and Object”.

vii I take the term “effusions” from Coleridge, who used it to characterize some of his most

characteristic early poetry – poetry, it should be remembered, that was deeply influenced by

Della Cruscan poetry. Coleridge’s expressivist “effusions” would soon mutate into the form of the

Conversation Poem, which for Abrams served as the initial and in many ways the exemplary form

of his Greater Romantic Lyric. I would only remark in passing that Coleridge’s greatest and

perhaps most significant poems were not the Conversation poems but his two great narrative

works and “Kubla Khan”, all three far from examples of Greater Romantic Lyric.

viii Byron reflected on the poetics of such places and such writing often, but particularly in his

exilic period from 1816. Not the least memorable of these reflections come at stanzas 96-97 of Childe

Harold Canto 3 and stanzas 104-106 of Canto 4. The former culminates and defines the unresolved

cycle that began – or I should say, began again -- in stanza 85. In this kind of lyrical writing, the

expressive movement feeds off a narrative sequence. I say “began again” because the structure and

style of this lyric writing in a cycle whose continuance is marked in the canto’s forecast of the move

from Switzerland to Italy. The latter foreshadows the last canto’s “Address to Ocean” (stanzas 179-

184), where the poem halts in a vision of endless mortal passage – the Pilgrim of Eternity indeed.

ix But like “the storm whereon [his poetry] rides”, the volatile weather of his verse does keep starting

and stopping, though its logistics remain beyond his control, if not beyond his recognition. So the

poetry rides its weather, sunshine and storm.

x See E. E. Bostetter, The Romantic Ventriloquists. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron. (U.

of Washington Press: Seattle, 1963).

xi The passage was first corrected in 1992 in the text published in CPW VII.

xii See the Conversations with Lady Blessington and Don Juan

xiii The Telling (Harper and Row: New York, 1973).